That's Not a Feeling

by Dan Josefson

  Ellie leaned back to look at him. “Oh, Roger, think for a second how that must have made those girls feel. Are they still in there now? They must feel completely out of control. Just when they most needed you to stay.… I understand you’re disappointed and scared, but we’re the adults, we’ve got to act like it.”

  Roger started crying again and pressed his face to Ellie’s shoulder. She hugged him. Ellie thought she could understand how exhausting it must be for Aubrey, trying to keep the school from going to pieces. She used to think that he simply had his job and they all had theirs, but this wasn’t quite so. Everyone pulled in his or her own direction, and it was only Aubrey who kept it all in his head, who could see through everyone’s evasions. That much clarity was excruciating, she realized.

  Roger sounded like he was choking on his tears. “Okay, okay, hon,” Ellie said, and squeezed his arm. “We’re not doing them any good sitting out here. Let’s go, Roger. Come on, now, get it together.”

  Tidbit made her way to Aubrey’s bedroom, and when he saw her he just nodded toward the chair by his bed, and she sat down. Tidbit kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on the edge of his bed again.

  “You had a little adventure?” he asked, and Tidbit nodded. His voice was raspy.

  “But you’re back?”

  Tidbit nodded again. That was all he said for a long time. Throughout the morning and early afternoon, Tidbit stayed in his apartment and looked after things. People called occasionally, and if Aubrey was awake he would answer his phone and listen but not say much. When he was asleep, Tidbit answered. The calls were from faculty members letting Aubrey know what was happening elsewhere on campus. As the afternoon went on, Tidbit heard strange noises from around the Mansion—creaking on the stairs, doors being pulled open and slammed shut, quick, pounding footfalls as though people were sprinting down the hallways. But eventually the phone calls stopped.

  Tidbit napped in the chair by Aubrey’s bed, and when she woke up she warmed up some soup she found in the refrigerator. She made a bowl for Aubrey and one for herself. She found some stale bread on the counter but toasted it, and it was all right. As they ate, Aubrey told her about his plan to write a book that would tell the history of Roaring Orchards and explain his philosophy. It would be, he said, a kind of intellectual autobiography. He talked about some things she didn’t follow, about the Garden of Epicurus and about the tragedies of Seneca. He said that maybe she could help him, that he could dictate parts and she could write them down.

  After Aubrey fell back asleep, Tidbit pulled one book off of his shelves and then another. She paged through one by someone called Procopius, but she couldn’t really concentrate. She walked around the room looking at the medallions on the wallpaper, trying to figure out what the designs on them had once been. Some looked like they were paintings of flowers, but others seemed to be abstract designs, like paisley.

  Aaron hadn’t said much to anyone the past two days. Yesterday he had waited for someone to come and talk to him, but no one had. In the evening, he sat at the square dance and had become aware of how angry he was. He watched the kids dance, then watched the caller and his assistant break down the speakers and record player and pack their things and leave. Since then, every time he tried to say anything more than a few words, his breath failed him.

  He squeezed the black garbage bag stuffed with his comforter into the backseat of his car. Aaron’s things fit easily into a few trash bags and the cheap plastic bins he had used when he moved in. He went in to see if he’d forgotten anything. His room looked just as it had when he’d arrived: yellow walls, bare mattress. Aaron had grown attached to this weird room, to the strange view of tree trunks immediately outside his window. He thought of taking something as a souvenir. There were a couple of empty med envelopes lying around, and the paperback he had borrowed from the school library lay in the corner. Aaron picked it up and saw that it was stamped PROPERTY OF ROARING ORCHARDS SCHOOL FOR TROUBLED TEENS, WEBITUCK, NEW YORK. He put it in his back pocket, began thinking about the students he would miss, then made himself stop.

  When Ken called his emergency meeting this morning, Aaron had hoped there would be a chance to talk about what had happened. He wanted to find a way to tell everyone that the school, the program, all of it, had to stop, the kids be sent home. Or at least he wanted to make someone explain to him why it should continue. But the meeting hadn’t been for that. Ken took the opportunity to announce that they were in crisis and to suspend all reflection in favor of panic. The emergency absolved them of any responsibility; they had only to regain control.

  Again, Aaron’s breath had failed him. He felt like he should call a meeting, but they were already in a meeting. As he tried to speak he saw images of himself standing in front of the room screaming, knocking people off their chairs; he saw himself crouched behind the desk. If he began, he didn’t know where it would end. Then the meeting was over, and Aaron went to his apartment and began packing. When Roger caught him loading up his car, Aaron had hardly been able to look at him, let alone explain.

  Aaron opened the driver’s-side door and looked around one last time. It was embarrassing that the only place he had to go was back to his parents’ house. He took the book from his pocket and tossed it onto the backseat. As he drove past the Mansion, Aaron told himself that he didn’t bear the place any ill will, though he knew that wasn’t true. Sunlight glinted across the windshield, and Aaron rolled his window down. The school was what it was, and he knew that even if he stayed, the system made it impossible for him to do anyone any good. As he drove through the gates and away down Route 294, Aaron knew that, too, was a lie.

  No one noticed that Bev had left. Students were everywhere, doing what they wanted. The sight of people wrapped in sheets running up and down the Mansion stairs unnerved her. It made her think of the demons she used to pretend to see, and she wondered whether this was some sort of punishment for lying. Or maybe her lies had made this happen? Anyway, it would be much funnier if they all were running around in the woods instead. She told a few of the other girls her idea, but no one wanted to go. So she left to do that herself. She was sure that everyone else would follow in a minute. It was too funny.

  That’s what I saw when I finally made it back to the school: Bev wrapped in a sheet running in figure eights around trees. She stopped when she saw me. “You’re not wearing any shoes,” she said.

  “You’re not wearing any clothes.”

  Bev looked down and then back at me, laughing. “Everyone else is coming, too. We’re all running.”

  I looked but didn’t see anyone else. “Where?” I asked.

  “They’ll be right here in a minute.” And then she whispered, “You shouldn’t talk to me, I’m a ghost.”

  “Is Tidbit here? Did she get brought back?”

  “I don’t know, she’s not in my dorm. Everything’s crazy inside.”

  “You didn’t see a police car or anything?”

  Bev stopped. “Are the police coming?”

  “I don’t know.” I wasn’t sure how much I could believe what Bev told me.

  As loud as she could, she shouted, “Yeesterday we are reading a turgee!”

  From the window of Aubrey’s apartment, Tidbit thought she saw something in the woods. Just a tiny movement, a flash of white. But she had no idea if it was anything and, if it were, what it might be. She was vaguely anxious that people were running. It made her feel that she was being left behind.

  Aubrey was swimming just beneath the surface of himself. Opening his eyes was an immense task. But there were things he wanted to say and to see. He had an idea, a bright, simple thing he wanted to tell someone before he forgot. He focused, and slowly his eyes opened. Tidbit sat looking out the window. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. Whatever it was he had been thinking of was lost in the intricacy of the things around him. The curtains, the complicated bit of sky he could see, and this incomprehensible child, her face in the sunlight. Aubrey squinted. There
was too much and he didn’t want to know anything about any of it. Tired and cranky, Aubrey rolled onto his side and faced the wall. He shut his eyes, not for the last time, on the fading designs on the marvelous wallpaper.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am happy to have this opportunity to thank the Fulbright Program and the International Institute for Modern Letters, now part of the Black Mountain Institute, for grants that aided in the completion of this novel.

  For their often baffling confidence in me and my work, my deepest thanks to my parents, and to Jami and Avi Josefson, Mali and Stephen Reimer, Henny, Amy, and Constantine Iliescu, and Lilly Ionascu; to Jim Shepard, Doug Unger, Richard Wiley, and Dave Hickey; to the late David Foster Wallace, whose generosity and whose body of work will always mean such a tremendous amount to me; to Julia Kohn, Andrew Miller, Tom Bissell, Jeff Alexander, Amber Hoover, Matthew McGough, Kim Henry, Dan Polsby, Vanessa Wruble, Karen Savir, Forrest Cole, Nathalie Chicha, and Michael Joseph Gross; and especially to Mark Doten, Bronwen Hruska, Scott Cain, and all the other wonderful people at Soho Press.

  TOM BISSELL ON DAN JOSEFSON, THE STATE OF PUBLISHING, AND DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

  When the manuscript of That’s Not a Feeling landed on my desk, one of the first things I was curious about was the David Foster Wallace blurb. I went to Dan’s friend, Tom Bissell (Chasing the Sea and Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter) for the full story.

  —Mark Doten, editor

  MD: When did you meet Dan?

  TB: I’ve known Dan for almost ten years now. He’s part of a group of guys who went to Williams together, and who became my closest friends in New York City, but I met Dan last of all of them. I knew of Dan, of course, and that he wanted to be a writer, but he was away in Romania for a long time, and we didn’t really talk much until he got back. Once he did, the first thing he told me was how much he had liked Chasing the Sea, my first book. So, obviously, I loved him. After that, we became incredibly close incredibly quickly. We had very different writing styles but very similar ideas about what writing was for and what it should do. And we’d read a lot of the same books. Pretty soon we were spending just about every weekend hanging out together. I’d say I’m as close to Dan as I am to any other man or writer on this planet.

  When Dan finished That’s Not a Feeling, things in publishing weren’t great. They were not as bad as they are now, obviously, but they were really, really bad, and at the time it didn’t seem possible things could get much worse.

  MD: I started working at Soho in August 2008, the very moment of the big economic downturn, and quite a rough time in publishing, with layoffs at all the big places—so I feel like in some sense the current lay of the land is all I’ve known. Do you think Dan’s book would have been picked up by a big house if it had been completed, say, ten years earlier?

  TB: It’s a mug’s game to pretend to know the answer to these hypotheticals, but everything in my heart says yes, I think it would have, especially with what Dan brings to the table with his connections and blurbs and talent. No one ten years ago would have read the book and thought, This is gonna sell a million copies. But ten years ago they might have been more sanguine about the career Dan has before him. And it will be a great career, filled with tremendously fine books. Franzen’s second book sold 2,200 copies in paperback. I know, because I used to work for the publisher who did it. It seems to me that the big houses today are much more content to poach writers like Dan after their third or fourth book rather than nurture them from the start, as FSG did with Franzen. And maybe that even makes sound financial sense. But it doesn’t make much cultural or artistic sense. Which is my two cents.

  MD: It’s certainly a great opportunity for independent press editors like myself, as agents and authors find some of the old doors closed to them. As dire as things may be in some corners, I think we’re in the middle of a very exciting time for independents like Soho, Coffeehouse, Other, Melville, Graywolf and so on. And there are new presses emerging all the time—Dzanc and Tyrant and Featherproof, to name just three—that have been publishing some really tremendous fiction.

  TB: I agree, wholeheartedly. The bigger houses will always get the chance to publish amazing stuff, but a certain brand of amazing book seems increasingly beyond their capacity to pursue. And that’s where you and Graywolf and Melville come in. Don’t freak out or anything, but you’re increasingly holding nothing less than the fate of serious American writing in your collective hands.

  MD: The shift certainly has created some changes in terms of gatekeepers. On the side of authors connecting with publishers, we have diffusion—more and more presses and venues for authors to target, even as fewer agents feel they are able to take on fiction that seems risky.

  TB: But that’s where these questions get so ridiculous and frustrating: risky to whom? Think of something like House of Leaves or Cloud Atlas or other densely literary, “difficult” books that have done extremely well. There is an appetite out there for work that’s unusual in some way, but agents pretend not to see that. Because they’ve had their hearts broken, so many agents back off from ever being hurt again. And that really gets my goat. Agents have to braver than writers, even, in some ways. So while I thought Dan’s book was astoundingly good, its unusual aspects and emotional subtlety, I feared, would make it a hard sell to agents who didn’t bother to read it carefully and slowly. I provided it with a blurb, but I wanted to give Dan’s book a real attention-getting shot with agents, using what little power I had. Thinking cap was on.

  MD: And so we come to that amazing David Foster Wallace blurb.

  TB: At the time I was living in Las Vegas. It was the spring of 2008. Dave Wallace and I had just reignited a correspondence after several years of not being in touch. I didn’t know, at the time, that he was in the middle of a terrible depressive tailspin (he alluded to being sick in his letters, but attributed it to a gastric illness), but we got the idea of my then-girlfriend and me driving over from Vegas to Claremont, CA, to spend a weekend with him and his wife, Karen. Right after we settled on this plan, I asked Dave if he would consent to reading Dan’s book, which I described to him, and told him of my fears. Dave said he could imagine exactly the kind of book it was, because he had friends he’d done the same thing for, for the same reason. He asked me to send it to him, and I did.

  When we got to Claremont, Dave told me he’d just finished Dan’s book, that he admired it, and that he wanted to dictate his blurb while he played chess. I wrote down about seven versions of the blurb while we played, which he fiddled with and changed after each move. He said he hated writing blurbs, because he was always aware that the truth of what he felt about books always seemed so plainspoken, while the blurby part of him wanted to say something smart and original. We had a long conversation about what blurbs were even for, and why they were so important. I wished I’d kept the piece of paper on which Dave and I worked out Dan’s blurb—written in my handwriting with Dave’s notational corrections on it—but I didn’t. I had no idea what was to come.

  I’m pretty sure Dan’s book was the last thing Dave blurbed. It may have even been one of the last novels he read. A couple weeks after we left, Dave tried to kill himself. Five months later, he succeeded.

  The irony is that not even with Dave’s blurb did Dan’s book get the careful, sensitive read it deserves and needs—that is, not until you. Dave blurbed Dan’s book as a favor to me, but also because he knew that certain types of novels are quote-unquote hard sells in the minds of many agents and editors. But I’d like to think Dave recognized something in Dan’s book—the way it cuts right to the heart of human longing and disappointment, and speaks to the quieter, less flashy parts of ourselves. Its honesty. Its integrity. Dave did see that in Dan’s book, I know. May it have given him some respite from his own horror at the time he read it. And may Dave’s truthful, unflashy blurb convince people of what so many of Dan’s earliest readers knew all along: Dan Josefson is a great writer and his novel is beautiful.


  DAN JOSEFSON ON THE THE PLACES HE LIVED WHEN WRITING

  TNAF, AND HOW THEY INFLUENCED HIM

  Where I Wrote It

  Of the many things that confuse me as a writer, the question of where to live is at once the most pressing and the most trivial. Pressing because I am, of course, always living someplace, so even a failure to decide is itself a kind of decision. And trivial because writing novels seems to be such exclusively mental work that it could just as well be done in one place as anywhere else. I began this book in Las Vegas, NV, and continued to work on it in Constanta, Romania, and in New Marlborough, MA, before finally finishing it in Brooklyn, NY.

  In Las Vegas, teaching assistantships at the university provided enough money for a classmate and me to rent a two-bedroom apartment around the corner from the Liberace Museum. Wall-to-wall carpeting, central air, a swimming pool, and a mimosa tree right outside the door; the peaked ceilings must have been twenty feet high. Our neighbor in the adjacent apartment was an electrician who was working on the city’s new monorail. He was partially deaf, which meant we could play our music as loud as we wanted. It also meant the action movies he watched with his son most nights were turned up high enough to make our shared wall shake. My room was on the opposite side of the apartment; I did most of my reading and writing in a La-Z-Boy recliner I bought at the Goodwill, and many nights, a notebook open on my chest, I fell asleep to the muffled sounds of explosions, car crashes, and laser cannons pounding away like the desert’s heartbeat.

  Tuesday nights I’d walk across the UNLV campus, past the aloe plants, desert willows, and red bottlebrush. If the sprinklers were on, the sharp scent of sage would rise as I walked to the art department classrooms, where Dave Hickey let me sit in on his art criticism seminars. Dave taught us history and theory and what he could about making good art, but mostly he coached us to make more art.